"In parliamentary systems, parties compete for votes and offices in the electoral arena but in many systems
they also cooperate in the legislative arena. This paper examines the question of whether the government
status of parties affects their legislative behaviour and, hence, policy outcomes. We... view more

"In parliamentary systems, parties compete for votes and offices in the electoral arena but in many systems
they also cooperate in the legislative arena. This paper examines the question of whether the government
status of parties affects their legislative behaviour and, hence, policy outcomes. We develop a simple veto
player model that includes parties’ positional goals (vote, office, etc.) to formalize the notion of accommodating
legislative behaviour. The model predicts that government parties are most accommodating while opposition
parties are least accommodating. The hypothesis is then tested by comparing two pairs of most similar
political systems: Danish and Finnish coalition governments, as well as German and Australian bicameralism.
The case studies support the main hypothesis that government status systematically affects parties’ level
of accommodation. We conclude that this has important implications for the two major approaches in comparative
institutional analysis advanced by Lijphart (1999) and Tsebelis (2002). Whilst Lijphart’s distinction
between joint and divided responsibility cannot provide a consistent theoretical rationale of his twodimensional
map of democracies, Tsebelis’ conception of purely policy-seeking actors may be insufficient to
adequately identify veto players in comparative research." [author´s abstract]... view less